Pivot or Perish
Or, Prisons need to change their ways
Well, hi!
My thoughts this day are on fonts of change. As before, I'm a prisoner of the state of Florida, writing to the outside world and painting a picture of life inside the concertina wire.
This day's thoughts aren't so complex to describe, but overcoming mindsets affected by them will possibly be the most difficult thing the State of Florida will ever do.
Pivot!
Those in the real world will recognize that as times change, so too does the opinion of humanity. Being inflexible in the face of change, that is, refusing to pivot can eventually break things, sometimes in a non-repairable way.
Businesses know this, and the ones still in business today are always in a state of changing to meet the needs and desires of the world they are immersed in.
The recent global pandemic pushed pivot or die down our throats in the corporate world and in the personal world. We as people changed our habits and dynamics just to go buy flour for yet another sourdough loaf, instant coffee for the Dalgona coffee craze, and bombarded brave souls with orders of takeaway shawarma and vegan egg rolls through the burgeoning gig economy delivery services in an effort to Stay the F@#k at Home, as Samuel L. Jackson summarized in his reading of a book with that title.
A decade prior to the pandemic had already seen the massive thrust into online shopping and delivery, even as old holdouts like Sears and K-Mart were glacially slow in trying to adapt, and sinking into the sea.
As so, the business world understands pivot or perish; so, too, should prison.
Prison Machine goes brrrrr
In Florida, at least, the prison industry is a massive machine designed to extract as much income out of local and distant communities as possible.
There is some return output, in the form of local jobs for officers, medical, support, and educational staff for the facility, and of sustained business for local and/or regional companies that might provide materials used by prisons (food, hygiene supplies, etc).
However, this very inflexible system is incurring its own growing costs in the form of supporting aging and infirm inmates that need increasing amounts of medical care as time passes, and, unlike using logic to look at other solutions to ameliorate the situation, it keeps trying to grind the meat.
Picture this: A 60-year-old man is incarcerated, and has been for 10 years. His health needs at his age have blossomed into a painfully expensive flower; other inmates, not assigned to him as a caregiver, are helping the man with day to day tasks above and beyond what a stranger should be expected to render. They are helping the man to bathe, use the toilet, and eat -- well above and beyond the casual "I'm going to medical; sure, I can push you there."
This is a person that needs to be in an assisted living facility at this point in life, not dependent on inmates being 'kind' enough to help -- after all, it's prison, and most folks don't want to do anything for free. How much inmate debt is he racking up? is a question I don't want to ask!
As a cost-saving measure, prison medical and its formularies are dreadfully limited, but, these limitations are also very shortsighted and missing the point.
We are denied access to ibuprofen in useful amounts to self manage our aches and pains. Yes, the venerable, generic as all get out, antiinflammatory that you can pick up for like 2¢ a pill at your local dollar store of your choosing, we can't even get unless we are one of the lucky 25-50 that manage to get to the Officer bubble when a supply of individual doses comes in. Mind you, that's 25-50 in a full dorm of 396.
We wait months for a diagnosis of an issue that could be anything; for eye examinations so that we can have eyeglasses to replace what we may have been wearing on the street; for time to talk with a mental health counselor because we want help -- we cannot get anything reliably within the walls, and there is no effort to ameliorate this.
Our punishment is to be sequestered here, not blatantly neglected. There are rightly and wrongly convicted people living in the prison system, eking out a survival against weighted odds. There are people here who seek to pivot away from a life of criminality to something honest, but the system itself has to pivot for their turn to gain purchase.
I wonder as I sit here, we have these tablets; why aren't the prisons trying to offer distance education?
Something like Moodle could be set up and offered to more inmates than a classroom can hold. Offer both in-person classes as they do now, but also offer tablet based classes with in-person exams to be conducted monthly, so that you can ensure your students aren't just buying someone to do the tablet work when you cannot see them.
This split allows for those who benefit from person to person education to get that, and for those who just want the materials and can figure it out on their own to get working. It creates jobs, whether you have an inmate group at one facility grade a different facility's classwork, or have freeworlders take up the mantle and work with us for our educational needs.
This... is pivoting with the times.
For people with less severe crimes, we live in an age of interconnected hardware that can figure where you are to within 30 feet. Instead of our fences and walls, trade theirs in for a geofence. Send them out, track their whereabouts, and don't mix the comparatively small stuff in with murderers, traffickers, and the like.
This throws me back to my old buddy Keef, whom I have mentioned in an earlier post: he could have, should have been housed in a halfway house and told he can go here and here, but not there with a tracker anklet. Instead, he's lumped in with big time criminals, for being at a public venue where he was banned.
This, too, would be a pivot toward doing right for those who have done wrong.
For all the teaching of compassion and care, so little of doing as one preaches is executed.
A meandering through ideas.
I realize that this started off easy, but then wandered through several thoughts, but I present these to you, o reader, as a memory bundle. These bundles function much like how organic memory does -- you can probably remember the first piece of Fruit Stripe Gum you chewed, maybe right outside the convenience store as you got on your bike to to home. Someone you cared for might've said, "Here's some money for a treat."
It's rarely a perfectly isolated memory of exactly one thing, but a motley collection of several people are typing things happening in parallel.
Prison, from this side of the wire, tries to regard inmates as exactly one thing: somebody convicted of a crime, who screwed up in a punishment-earning way; the data stream that says "I'm a human" gets stripped off, and if pushed hard enough, might overwrite our self-identity of "human".
This is where I exhort the world to not do that. This creates and invokes monsters that wouldn't have spawned otherwise.
Not all of us are monsters. Not all of us want to be converted into monsters. There are monsters who long to be human, to be regarded as human, to have a chance to earn the respect of being human again.
Prison needs to pivot, to adjust how prisoners are treated, to close the Monster Pipeline that drains out into society. Communities need to insist on this, to help build this new paradigm, to put lubricant in the gears and tune the springs, empty the hopper and try once more so we can try once more.
To you, I ask, Are we worth helping while we're down, so that we might learn how to stand and walk again once we go forth again?
Light some incense and send me a good thought. I'll be here, working behind the concertina wire to lift others up, an they should ask.
Be good to each other. Seek to gain and share wisdom.
Never be afraid to admit you don't know, but be afraid to not want to learn something beneficial.
Take care, dear reader. :)